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What Happens When You Die? Evidence Suggests Time Simply Reboots

What happens when we die? Do we rot into the ground, or do we go to heaven (or hell, if we’ve been bad)? Experiments suggest the answer is simpler than anyone thought. Without the glue of consciousness, time essentially reboots.

The mystery of life and death can’t be examined by visiting the Galapagos or looking through a microscope. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves. We awake in the present. There are stairs below us that we appear to have climbed; there are stairs above us that go upward into the unknown future. But the mind stands at the door by which we entered and gives us the memories by which we go about our day. Everything is ordered and predictable. We’re like cuckoo birds who appear through a door each morning. We fancy there’s a clockwork set in motion at the beginning of time.

But if you remove everything from space, what’s left? Nothing. The same applies for time — you can’t put it in a jar. You can’t see through the bone surrounding your brain (everything you experience is information in your mind). Biocentrism tells us space and time aren’t objects — they’re the mind’s tools for putting everything together.

I was a young boy when I realized there was something unexplainable about life that I simply didn’t understand. I learned this from one of the last smiths in New England, when I, as a child, tried to capture a woodchuck on his property.

Over his shop a chimney cap went round and round, squeak, squeak, rattle, rattle. One day the blacksmith came out with his shotgun and blew it off. The noise stopped. Mr. O’Donnell pounded metal on his anvil all day. No, I thought, I didn’t want to be caught by him. Yet, I had my purpose.

The woodchuck’s hole was in such close proximity to Mr. O’Donnell’s shop that I could hear the bellows fanning his forge. I crawled noiselessly through the long grass, occasionally stirring a grasshopper or a butterfly. After setting a new steel trap that I had just purchased at the hardware store, I took a stake and, rock in hand, pounded it into the ground. When I looked up, I saw Mr. O’Donnell standing there, his eyes glaring. I said nothing, trying to restrain myself from crying. “Give me that trap, child,” he said, “and come with me.”

I followed him into his shop, which was crammed with all manner of tools and chimes of different shapes and sounds hanging from the ceiling. Starting the forge, Mr. O’Donnell tossed the trap over the coals and a tiny flame appeared underneath, getting hotter until, with a puff it burst into flame. “This thing can injure dogs, and even children!” he said, poking the coals with a fork. When the trap was red hot, he took it from the forge, and pounded it into a little square with his hammer. He said nothing while the metal cooled. At length, he patted me upon the shoulder, and then took up a few sketches of a dragonfly. “I tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give you 50 cents for every dragonfly you catch.” I said that would be fun, and when I parted I was so excited I forgot about my new trap.

The next day I set off with a butterfly net. The air was full of insects, the flowers with bees and butterflies. But I didn’t see any dragonflies. As I floated through the last of the meadows, the spikes of a cattail attracted my attention. A huge dragonfly was humming round and round, and when at last I caught it, I hopped and skipped all the way back to Mr. O’Donnell’s shop. Taking a magnifying glass, he held the jar up to the light and made a careful study of the dragonfly. He fished out a number of rods, and with a little pounding, wrought a splendorous figurine that was the perfect image of the dragonfly. It had about it a beauty as airy as the delicate insect.

As long as I live I will remember that day. And though Mr. O’Donnell is gone now, there still remains in his shop that little iron dragonfly — covered with dust now — to remind me there’s something more elusive to life than the succession of shapes we see frozen into matter.

Before he died, Einstein said “Now Besso [an old friend] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us … know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” In fact, it was Einstein’s theory of relativity that showed that space and time are indeed relative to the observer. Quantum theory ended the classical view that particles exist if we don’t perceive them. But if the world is observer-created, we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s destroyed with each of us. Nor should we be surprised that space and time vanish, and with them all Newtonian conceptions of order and prediction.

It’s here at last, where we approach the imagined border of ourselves, the wooded boundary where in the old fairy tale the fox and the hare say goodnight to each other. At death, we all know, consciousness is gone, and so too the continuity in the connection of times and places. Where then, do we find ourselves? On stairs that, like Emerson said, can be intercalated anywhere, “like those that Hermes won with the dice of the moon, that Osiris might be born.” We think that the past is past and the future the future. But as Einstein realized, this simply isn’t the case.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing; in reality you can take any time — whether past or future — as your new frame of reference. Death is a reboot that leads to all potentialities. That’s the reality that the experiments mandate. And when I see Mr. O’Donnell’s old shop, I know that somewhere the chimney cap is still going round and round, squeak, squeak. But it probably won’t rattle for long.

Further Reading

"Beyond Biocentrism is an enlightening and fascinating journey that will forever alter your understanding of your own existence."
—Deepak Chopra

"Beyond Biocentrism is a joyride through the history of science and cutting-edge physics, all with a very serious purpose: to find the long-overlooked connection between the conscious self and the universe around us."
—Corey Powell, ex editor-in-chief, Discover magazine

"Will machines ever achieve consciousness? Are plants aware? Is death an illusion? These are some of the big questions tackled in Beyond Biocentrism, which serves up a new, biology-based theory of everything that is as delightful to read as it is fascinating."
—Pamela Weintraub, ex editor-in-chief of OMNI Magazine

Biocentrism takes you on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe‒our own‒from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. It will shatter your ideas of life-time and space, and even death…you will never see reality the same again.

"Like "A Brief History of Time" it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work… Most importantly, it makes you think."
—Nobel Prize Winner E. Donnall Thomas

Lanza featured on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC’s) Ideas, one of the oldest and most respected radio programs in the world

BEYOND BIOCENTRISM: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of DeathHost Paul Kennedy has his understanding of reality turned-upside-down by Dr. Robert Lanza in this paradigm-shifting hour. Dr. Lanza provides a compelling argument for consciousness as the basis for the universe, rather than consciousness simply being its by-product.

Lanza’s Paper is the Cover Story of Annalen der Physik, which Published Einstein’s Theories of Relativity

In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer. This new paper takes this one step further, arguing that the observer creates it. The paper shows that the intrinsic properties of quantum gravity and matter alone cannot explain the tremendous effectiveness of the emergence of time and the lack of quantum entanglement in our everyday world. Instead, it’s necessary to include the properties of the observer, and in particular, the way we process and remember information.

Dr. Robert Lanza selected for the 2014 TIME 100 list of the hundred most influential people in the world, along with Beyoncé, Hillary Clinton, Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, Robert Redford, and other artists, pioneers, leaders, titans and icons.

Biocentrism Author, Robert Lanza Named One of the Top 50 “World Thinkers”

Robert Lanza selected as one of the top “World Thinkers 2015” by Prospect Magazine. The thinkers were chosen for “engaging in original and profound ways with the central questions of the world today,” as well as for their continuing significance for “this year’s biggest questions” (in economics, science, philosophy, cultural and social criticism and in politics).

From Wikipedia: The h-index measures both the productivity and impact of a scientist or scholar. A value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure (associate professor) at major [US] research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences. According to Hirsch (who put forward the h-index), an h index of 20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is truly exceptional.

How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Don’t miss the book that started it all, and shocked the world with its radical rethinking of the nature of reality.

In biocentrism, Robert Lanza and Bob Berman team up to turn the planet upside down with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe‒our own‒from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. It will shatter the reader’s ideas of life-time and space, and even death … the reader will never see reality the same again.

“Like “A Brief History of Time” it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work… Most importantly, it makes you think.”—Nobel Prize Winner E. Donnall Thomas

Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

Biocentrism shocked the world with a radical rethinking of the nature of reality.

But that was just the beginning.

“Beyond Biocentrism is an enlightening and fascinating journey that will forever alter your understanding of your own existence.”—Deepak Chopra

“Beyond Biocentrism is a joyride through the history of science and cutting-edge physics, all with a very serious purpose: to find the long-overlooked connection between the conscious self and the universe around us.”—Corey S. Powell, former editor-in-chief, Discover magazine

Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a US News & World Report cover story called him a “genius” and a “renegade thinker,” even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce Biocentrism, a revolutionary new view of the universe.

Every now and then a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western, natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, towards doubt and uncertainty in the physical explanations of the universe’s genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe—our own—from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the reader’s ideas of life—time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.

The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility, and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.

Robert Lanza Worked (and Published Scientific Papers) with Some of the Greatest Scientists of the 20th Century

“I downloaded a digital copy of [biocentrism] in the privacy of my home, where no one could observe my buying or reading such a “New Agey” sort of cosmology book. Now, mind you, my motivation was not all that pure. It was my intention to read the book so I could more effectively refute it like a dedicated physicist was expected to…The book had the completely opposite effect on me. The views that Dr. Lanza presented in this book changed my thinking in ways from which there could never be retreat. Before I had actually finished reading the book, it was abundantly obvious to me that Dr. Lanza’s writings provided me with the pieces of perspective that I had been desperately seeking. Everything I had learned and everything I thought I knew just exploded in my mind and, as possibilities first erupted and then settled down, a completely new understanding emerged. The information I had accumulated in my mind hadn’t changed, but the way I viewed it did –in a really big way.”

— Scott M. Tyson, Physicist, The Unobservable Universe

“The heart of [biocentrism], collectively, is correct. On page 15 they say “the animal observer creates reality and not the other way around.” That is the essence of the entire book, and that is factually correct. It is an elementary conclusion from quantum mechanics. So what Lanza says in this book is not new. Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do NOT say it—or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private—furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no! Bless Robert Lanza for creating this book, and bless Bob Berman for not dissuading friend Robert from going ahead with it. Not that I think Robert Lanza could be dissuaded–this dude doesn’t dissuade! Lanza’s remarkable personal story is woven into the book, and is uplifting. You should enjoy this book, and it should help you on your personal journey to understanding.

“Having interviewed some of the most brilliant minds in the scientific world, I found Dr. Robert Lanza’s insights into the nature of consciousness original and exciting. His theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient traditions of the world which say that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world. It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence…I agree more with [Lanza] than with anyone else that I have ever met.”

— Deepak Chopra, Bestselling Author (heralded by Time magazine as one of the top heroes and icons of the century)